vlgr

Download It While You Can - The Future Of Local AI

SCI/TECH Featured

vlgr Oct 28, 2026

Download It While You Can - The Future Of Local AI

The state gets Copilot. Corporations get enterprise contracts. Nvidia wants a yearly fee per GPU. And the citizen gets the safe, age-verified, risk-assessed and politely lobotomized cloud AI. Unless they run their own.

Civil Servants, Citizen Data and Generative AI: Four Years of Administrative Negligence

SCI/TECH Featured

vlgr Oct 28, 2026

Civil Servants, Citizen Data and Generative AI: Four Years of Administrative Negligence

Prove you're 18 to use a chatbot. The chatbot already has your tax return. Sweden has just blocked ChatGPT and Claude on government computers. Nearly four years after ChatGPT went public, governments are discovering that their clerks could feed citizens' data into consumer AI accounts all along. If the state has been quietly running on AI for years, why hasn't it got any faster?

France Regularly Loses Its Hafnium - The Stuff Used in Nuclear Control Rods and Aerospace

SCI/TECH Featured

vlgr Oct 27, 2026

France Regularly Loses Its Hafnium - The Stuff Used in Nuclear Control Rods and Aerospace

In the night of 21–22 October 2026, several hundred kilograms of hafnium crystals were taken from the Framatome plant at Jarrie, Isère. The site is classified Seveso high-threshold and is France’s only facility that refines metallic hafnium. The loss is valued at several million euros. It is the sixth theft of this material at the same plant since 2019.

Brazil’s two-hour democracy - Rules changed, The Better Man Won, Brussels applauds

POLITICS Featured

vlgr Oct 26, 2026

Brazil’s two-hour democracy - Rules changed, The Better Man Won, Brussels applauds

On Sunday, October 25, Brazil was supposed to finish voting at 5 p.m. Instead, the country witnessed an extraordinary last-minute judicial intervention. Supreme Court Justice Cristiano Zanin, who previously served as Lula's personal lawyer, ordered voting extended until 7 p.m. Ursula von der Leyen wasted little time congratulating her friend Lula on his electoral victory.

Rothschild & Co Advising Ukraine on a Two-Bank Sale to Secure More Credit

POLITICS Featured

vlgr Oct 26, 2026

Rothschild & Co Advising Ukraine on a Two-Bank Sale to Secure More Credit

With Washington no longer writing new Ukraine aid cheques on the Biden-era scale, Zelensky has been desperately looking for fresh money. The IMF's $8.1 billion programme comes with banking-sector reform commitments, including preparing two state-owned banks for sale. Meet London's Rothschild & Co and its longtime Ukrainian partner FinPoint.